You can see this one coming a mile away.

Once again it's time to sharpen our cynicsm. Driving and listening to NPR recite that today the CIA is opening it's "Family Jewels" -- 30 year old "secrets" that might be a big draw to historians yet somehow manage to gobble up most available news bandwidth.

When all the talking heads are spouting identical words it's a clue: they're all being fed from the same source.

A bit of cynicism, if you please.

Why is the CIA opening it's archives now? Gee, real head scratcher. Let's take two guesses:

• distraction
• handily puts the activities of the current President into a context he prefers - you wanna talk warrantless wiretapping: here we've got years of wiretapping history, havva look.

But the big one: by opening old archives this administrative, routinely noted as the most secretive in history, is going to use it as the basis for claiming that they are, in fact, very transparent. See they'll show you stuff that had nothing to do with them. If you can't change the subject try to shift the focus to irrelevant "evidence" of a claim -- to openness -- that they will soon make. They have no basis for such a claim and so are creating one out of items that are of irrelevant to the substance of the claim. Sure, it's good to finally open these archives, but it's irrelevant to the point and hence a distraction.

These are easy to see coming.